


my ghosts approve

by hoars



Series: that boy is a monster [3]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Canonical Character Death, F/M, M/M, Past Mpreg, Rape/Non-con Elements, Underage - Freeform, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-17
Updated: 2013-09-17
Packaged: 2017-12-26 20:44:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/970106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hoars/pseuds/hoars
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(optional) </p>
<p>Derek loves all his past loves because they all taught him how to love Stiles best.</p>
            </blockquote>





	my ghosts approve

**Author's Note:**

> Non-con element is a brief sentence referring to Derek and Kate. Blink and you'd miss it.
> 
> This is a small piece to try and absorb the wreck that is Derek's love into my head canon. Mostly, I've decided Derek shouldn't be allowed to make decisions.

Derek will never apologize for who he is. What he is. No matter what that makes him. He won’t apologize for what he isn’t either.

He isn’t human.

He used to believe it made him superior. He’s faster, stronger, more durable than humans. He can heal nearly instantaneously and his senses are sharper. Werewolves are better suited to the survival game. Werewolves are evolution’s solution to humans.

"What do you prefer?" Derek asks, trapped as too were and too wolf instead of one or the other.

“ _You’re_ alluring,” Stiles decides after spending too long staring and weighing. "Everything about _you_ draws me in."

Derek considers those words carefully. "You're stupid."

"And reckless." Stiles adds with a smile. "Der, I love you. If you're nothing, or everything in the zoo."

When the hunters find out that the Hales are taking locals for mates he comes face to face with the fact he isn’t human again.

But Stiles says it's okay, so it is.

It’s so easy to rip someone open. To muffle a beating heart into silence. Bones snap so easily. Derek does it all without thinking. He sees the threat and acts.

Only when corpses start to cool and Derek has to blink blood from his eyes does his brain start connecting thoughts to the cacophony of sensation from seconds ago. He’s a werewolf. A man and a wolf forced to share one skin. He isn’t supposed to feel terror. He’s a creature of fear. Humans have written about his kind for centuries to scare each other.

Then there’s Stiles bent over their baby, shielding him with his body and he knows it's all just a lie werewolves tell each other so they can sleep at night.

Love is the real monster.

*

Derek's love kills people.

There's three great loves of Derek's life before Stiles.

Paige.

Kate.

Jennifer.

He still loves them all. They have all taught him important lessons. Lessons he will never forget, like he will never forget their names or the scars they left behind his ribs.

Stiles makes Derek love every single one of them more fiercely than ever.

"Someone brave is going to love you," Paige promised between one breath and the end of her heart.

What's surprising is, she keeps her promise.

*

Derek holds his newborn son close and thinks Paige would have loved Stiles too.

When the moon is fat in the sky and he can't resist the change, he dreams about Paige and Stiles together.

He thinks of how Paige would teach Stiles' long fingers to create, and Stiles would teach her to use her hands to protect. He thinks of Paige's long brown hair falling into Stiles' face as she straddles him, but both their gazes are on Derek and beckoning him with their eyes. He thinks Paige and Stiles would always be instigating trouble and would have had him wrapped completely around their fingers. He thinks Paige would have made Stiles cautious and Stiles would have made Paige brave, but now he'll never get to find out.

*

Paige never went into the woods.

She was afraid of them. Afraid of Derek and his family and whatever else might linger in the shadows behind Derek. He could never lie to her and tell her there was no reason to be afraid. She always knew when he lied. Looking at him with an eyebrow raised like he was brain damaged.

"I know for a fact there's an alpha meeting going on in there." Paige says. "The Argents warned everyone about seeing Deucalion, Kali, Ennis and Remus."

"It doesn't mean they'll hurt you," Derek protests.

"It doesn't mean they won't." She snaps back.

She does play her cello where he can hear it. Her music runs alongside him in the woods. He can see her whenever he hears the first few notes as soon as he closes his eyes. She puts so much of herself in her music, just for Derek. She shares so much of herself for him.

It makes him fall in love with her, a little bit to start.

He sings along.

Howls that make his mom smile and his wolf family sing too.

"You're okay," She teases him, cleaning her equipment with a quirky smile. "Your family makes up for it."

Derek smiles at her pleased because Peter whispers in his ears a lot about human girls. Uncle Peter likes to say, human girls only like werewolf boys when they're pretending to be human boys. Paige doesn't do that.

After all, she never steps foot in the woods. She knows he isn't a human boy, but she still likes him.

Paige is like a princess from his mom's fairytales.

Long dark hair, fair skin and kind eyes with a gift for music. Like the princess that would sing and the woods would sing along with her. Derek would gladly wrestle any dragon for her. Kill any troll to stand by her side without worrying about things like territory.

He stays on one side of the borderline and she the other, and their lips touch very gently.

Just like the fairytales.

She dies when she asks Derek for a chance to be with him and the lupine shadows behind him overhear. She dies because everyone thought the girl courting a werewolf would survive the bite. She dies because Derek loves her too much to see her face twist in pain.

"I love you," She says and he knows that. He can hear it every time she drags her bow across the strings she's thinking of him. He brings his claws to her artery. "Someone brave is going to love you." She promises.

_Someone brave_ , her voice reminds him constantly over the years. _Brave, brave, someone brave_ is the hope that keeps him alive.

"I'll always love you." He promises her and silences her heartbeat and the music that ran with him forever.

"I love you," He tells Stiles so quietly no one but his heart hears for certain.

A decade after Paige made her promise there's a man with the bravery to cross the divide between human territory and wolf territory not once but all the time.  A man that wears Derek's marks with pride. A man that when faced with fear, sets his feet in the dirt and braces himself. His heart beats and skips all over the place, all the music Derek needs now.

"I love you," Stiles says because Stiles isn't quiet.

He's always filling the silence like Paige's cello used to.

*

Their baby is tiny with a full head of thick brown hair.

He's the size of Derek's forearm, his head resting in the crook of his elbow. So tiny. Derek would worry about breaking him, but this child is a Hale. Most importantly, this child is Stiles'. He's plenty strong already even for a few hours.

John smiles, a trembling thing full of fear and love, and leans in close to his grandson. Mom oversees everything from Stiles bedside, her hand wrapped around her son-in-law's to keep the pain at bay.

*

Kate had brown hair with expensive blonde highlights.

"You're going to ruin anyone you love," Kate tells him in the quiet after he explains his blue eyes. He doesn't flinch because Kate is all thorn and none of the rose. She's his punishment for Paige. "You'll destroy them."

He doesn't think she was wrong. He can't when he knows Stiles would impale himself on Derek's claws if he thought for a second it would save Derek's life. He sees the scars on Stiles' wrist, his neck and inner thigh and thinks, _I broke him_ , but he also sees the way Stiles touches the bites and smiles and thinks, _he put himself back together better than before._

He meets Kate a week before he's kidnapped.

He was curious about the human woman on the wrong side of the divide.

The way she stood light on her feet, a knife in her hand and smelling of gunpowder. Derek was stupid enough to hope she would be the one Paige talked about, the one brave enough to love him. Paige would have hated Kate. Everything about her from the way her hands were scarred and clumsy for anything delicate like the cello to her smug smirk that would have made Paige pigheaded.

Paige and Stiles would have bonded over their mutual hate of Kate, Derek thinks with a quiet smile.   

"People want to kill you." Kate says, looking at him like she's never met someone more stupid in her life.

"Hunters want to kill me." Derek corrects because he just might be.

"Hales aren't people." Kate says simply, like it simply is and it's the easiest truth she knows. "Hales are monsters."

She fucks him a day before grabbing him to torture for information about his family. Or maybe she tortures him because she wants to bait them. Derek isn't completely sure, almost nine years later. The torture part kept him dazed a lot of the time and the other half, Kate spent telling him about monsters and why he was less as she used him to sate her body.

Yes, Stiles would have hated Kate for all the reasons Derek loves her.

A vicious, wild monster like him, like Stiles, all bright eyed and willing to do whatever she had to.

*

"We devour those who would subdue us." Stiles says fiercely.

He meets Derek eyes squarely. He's breathing hard in his fury. The bruises on his face of no consequence to him, but make Derek want to howl for a Great Hunt. He would too. He'd call down the spirit of the hellhounds, embrace their fire and darkness into his soul to make them pay.

But the hunters tried hurting Derek first.

Stiles made them regret that.

The bodies can hardly be identified as such, and Derek tells their son the story of Daddy saving Papa in all its violent glory.

*

"Don't overlook the flower, there might be a serpent underneath." Jennifer/Julia warns.

Derek thanks her for the advice because without, he would have stayed away from a persistent human boy.

After his mom killed the hunters that took him, including Kate Argent, the alphas gather to his mom's woods.

He's allowed to sit on the meetings. His eyes turned red, to replace the blue, a little while ago when Laura transformed into a wolf and never shuddered back. She joined their father on four legs, leaving him and Cora behind.

"Little Alpha," He everyone calls him.

It makes him itch in his skin because he isn't an alpha. His eyes just glow red because Laura's can't. Not because he deserves it. He really doesn't like it actually, because his mom is alpha until the day she dies and may the Moon be with him, hopefully afterwards too.

There's a female alpha that laughs when she hears about Derek, "You just don't like it gentle, do you?"

Derek blushes.

The female alpha is tall and dark. Kali. Destroyer of worlds. She's beautiful and dangerous in all the ways Kate wanted to be. Strong and confident in all the ways Paige wanted to be. But Derek loves Kate and Paige just as they were, not because of who they wanted to be.

There's a woman that hovers around Kali's pack.

Derek doesn't overlook her like everyone else seems to. He's drawn to her side, much to her surprise. She's older than him, but by how much, he isn't sure.

"That's the magic," Peter says squinting at her. "I bet if someone threw mistletoe on her, she'd look like she needs a power scooter."

She treats him like a person. It's been a long time since someone has treated Derek like he's people and not animal. She lends him books she thinks he'll like. It's a seduction he doesn't think she intended but happens anyways because of the things she's underlined in her books and the notes she's written. Derek always knew words were important, but she makes him understand how they are.

But there's something not right.

_"You'll ruin anyone who loves you,"_ Kate said.

Jennifer likes Derek to call her Jennifer when no one is around. When the others are around, especially Kali, she has him call her Julia. He doesn't think to wonder why. He assumed it was a human thing. Looking back, that was a stupid assumption because humans aren't that different from werewolves, everyone just likes to think they are.

Julia covets.

Julia burns.

So Jennifer kills.

Jennifer is horrified by it all. She begs for Derek's forgiveness. Tells him she never lied about how she felt. Derek stares at Kali's broken body and tells her, "But you aren't the person I love." He never met Julia before. He doesn't think so. It's all a little confusing in his head, but he's sure that the person he loves died when Jennifer and Julia became Jennifer/Julia.

There is a distinction despite what others think. Jennifer is a druid that wanted to be seen for who she was. Julia is a darach that wanted to control a pack of werewolves. It's okay, Derek confuses himself sometimes too, remembering if it's Julia or Jennifer he loved best.

Stiles can be like that.

He hides the monster everyone calls Man behind smiles and laughter, but unlike Jennifer/Julia, he doesn't hide it from Derek.

*

"My boy's mother was a hellion." John says conversationally. "I've always been the law enforcement type. Stiles inherited a little of both. He'll do anything for family." Derek hears the echo of John removing the safety from his gun as he watches the scene unfold.

"It's not right, sheriff." Argent tries to placate. "Your boy and the spawn he whelped are abominations."

John smiles grimly. "Maybe. But they're mine."

The sheriff of Beacon Hills shoots an Argent in the head. The body crumpling to the forest floor. Derek keeps watching. His son, a toddler now, watching his grandpa calmly re-engage the safety. "Let your father and sister look after the baby." John nods towards the lupine shadows that are Derek's family. "Help me get rid of the body."

"Yes, sir." Derek says, setting his son down.

Laura comes forward on paws to play with his son; his father remaining at a distance to oversee.

Derek picks up the body, John leading the way and remembers a conversation with Stiles. A conversation about hunters that should know better and protective fathers. A conversation of hypotheticals that Derek watched play out tonight that Stiles whispered about, his words dripping with manipulation.

Moments like these, Derek believes in his heart, his eyes only glow red because Stiles' can't.

*

"You have a type." Mom says, amused after they burn Jennifer/Julia.

It takes him until Stiles to understand what she means.

To understand what they all mean to him.

_"Someone brave," Paige said._

Stiles stumbles head first into the woods and Derek's bed without forethought.

_"You'll destroy them," Kate said._

Stiles pushed family and friends away to draw Derek closer.

_"Don't overlook." Jennifer/Julia said._

Stiles trusts Derek with his monster and greets Derek's like a lover at every turn.

Derek loves all his past loves because they all taught him how to love Stiles best.

*

Embracing his mate and baby in his arms, Derek looks at his mate and whispers, "Thank you," and kisses them both.


End file.
